Talk:Climate change in Canada

Draft of update to Ontario to include Doug Ford administration

Please go to User:TheDoDahMan/draft2, review and comment.TheDoDahMan (talk) 17:43, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Article updated 23 May 2019

Article is now updated. TheDoDahMan (talk) 08:17, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Suggested changes to headings and structure

I suggest to change the headings and structure of this article to be in line with the template that has been proposed here for all articles of the nature "Climate change in Country X": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Climate_change/Style_guide (see also discussion on that page's talk page). Anyone has any objections? If not, who's got time to give it a go? I am slowly working away at this for all the countries but would love some collaborators. EMsmile (talk) 03:12, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Hey EMsmile, I just saw this after I made my post below. Indeed, I agree with this proposal, and I'd like to help you out in this. However, most of information we need for this is absent from this article right now: we need to research it. Second, most of the current article is about climate policy. Moving that content as per the proposal in the next section would help declutter this article. Mottezen (talk) 05:38, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi Mottezen, great to hear from you and to know that you're also interested in improving this article. I think if we apply the standard structure then this would give clarity on what still needs to be added. Those sections could initially stay almost empty and then be filled over time. Decluttering could perhaps be achieved by condensing information and reducing excessive detail (if there is excessive detail). I am not a great fan of creating sub-sub-articles, e.g. in my opinion the information on emissions should be included in "Climate change in Canada" and not be in a separate article. Those sub-sub-articles get lower and lower view rates. The article on Canada would get a lot of view rates, the article on "climate change in Canada" already a lot less... I haven't checked yet but it's also important that this article gets linked properly from the Canada article, and a few sentences about climate change in Canada are included in the Canada article... (I've had those debates for other country articles (Australia, Bangladesh, India) as well where there has been some opposition; people saying the country articles should just be about history & politics, not about environmental issues and climate change...) EMsmile (talk) 08:18, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Ok I see your point. I suggested the creation of the “GHG emissions in Canada” mostly to move the emissions breakdown tables away from this article. I feel that those are too much detail for an article dealing primarily with climate change. I updated them last year, first time in 10 years, and not sure I’ll be motivated to do it again. Regardless, actual prose need to written on Canadian emissions.

Decluttering could perhaps be achieved by condensing information and reducing excessive detail This is missing the point. If we were to implement the new outline immediately without removing any of the information, 2/3 of the article would be in the “governmental effort” section. Most of that prose is good, but belongs to policy-focused articles. Mottezen (talk) 09:23, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

I think such an "imbalance" would not be problematic at this point, and could get corrected later over time. If you look at the other articles about climate change in specific countries, their level of details for different sections varies a lot (in my dreams, I plan to restructure all of them - hopefully together with many collaborators). I mean all these articles here. And I guess it could be discussed if information about climate change policies should be in this article or in Environmental policy of Canada (an article with very low view rates by the way). Personally, I think people would be more likely to expect it here, because climate change has become a topic of its own and is not just seen as an "environmental issue" anymore; with all the different facets of sustainable development, human health, emissions trading etc. it all goes beyond "environmental policy" in my opinion. - Oh and I see your point about those emissions tables now. My natural instinct would be to move them up to be in the heading "emissions". But I guess they could be off-putting so early in the article. Or create a new article called Greenhouse gas emissions by Canada? There are several like those in existence, see in this category. Often they also include information on mitigation which then would overlap with the article "Climate change in country X" which I find not ideal (but it's probably like that for historical reasons). Maybe only move those tables to there but not much prose, and treat it as a sub-article to "Climate change in Canada"? EMsmile (talk) 13:26, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Ok I agree, let's fix this article first, and then start thinking about possible splits. However, I just wanted to let you know that the article "Environmental policy of Canada" has low pageviews mostly because it has few inter wiki links in other articles. This is because it was originally created and developped under another name: Environmental policy of the Harper government. The Wikipedians who wrote the article treated it as this much narrower topic when linking it in other articles. Not much serious work has been done on it since the name change. However, if we were to makes this a great article, we could link it in all related pages and it would get way more page views.

We need to remember, however, that page views are not worth anything if the page is so long or confusing that most people don't read past the lead. Mottezen (talk) 06:49, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I am seeing agreement about implementing the recommended outline for country-based climate change articles, even if a lot gets moved under the heading "Mitigation and Adaptation." I will work on that. In shorter articles, there are examples of "Government Efforts" that seem to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, so it was difficult to make two separate Headings. We could easily separate them later if it seems to make sense.PlanetCare (talk) 13:28, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Article split

While short in prose, this article is a complete mess. This is mostly because it tries two be too many things at once. The content would make more sense if it was split in these four stand-along articles:

• Climate change in Canada (to discuss primarily the changing climate of the country),
• Greenhouse gas emissions by Canada (create stand-alone article),
• Environmental policy of Canada (an article that needs to be rewritten anyway), and
• Environmental policy of the Justin Trudeau government (for all the most recent and ongoing (non-)developments).

Anybody has any objections or suggestions on this proposal? Mottezen (talk) 05:19, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

I've replied to you in the section before this one. EMsmile (talk) 08:18, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

This article is only 32kB at the moment, but it is a mess. I would suggest rearranging it along those lines within this article first, and see what it looks like from there. For example, the "Climate change by province" section, which repeats the same topics over and over again, should be split among the broad categories above. A lot of the policy information in this article, especially the Trudeau section, seems to be a series of bullet points as sections. It could probably be rewritten as short paragraphs. The views of both governments mentioned feel like they should be subsections of the existing "Public policy" section (equivalent to the "Environmental policy of Canada" mentioned above), which currently just contains Kyoto. CMD (talk) 16:20, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments. Indeed, we need to fix this article before thinking of splitting it. The Trudeau section could be an exception though: I want to combine this section with Domestic_policy_of_the_Justin_Trudeau_government#Environment_policy, as part of that existing section or in a new article, keeping only a brief summery here. Mottezen (talk) 06:37, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

There's actually not much here, it just looks like a lot. I've shifted the information that was here around to collapse it all. I certainly agree that the detailed bullet points here can go to the more specific page, leaving just the introductory sentences. For example, "Canada has established the following climate change funding programs" can be changed to "Canada has established a number of climate change funding programs" and leave the detail to the other articles. More could go too, but there's clear low-hanging fruit. CMD (talk) 13:43, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Split off greenhouse gas emissions statistics tables?

Firstly, thanks to User:PlanetCare, User:Mottezen and User:Chidgk1 for your joint collaborative work on restructuring the article! Looks like it is progressing really well. I am just wondering if we should maybe create a separate article called "Greenhouse gas emissions by Canada" and move to there the tables with the emissions which are currently under "statistics" and maybe the table that appears further down called "Greenhouse gas emissions (t CO2Eq) per capita (2016)". I just worry a bit that people might stop reading the article when they get to the big tables, as they are expecting to see prose, not tables. Also the tables will be out of date fairly quickly (who has time & energy to keep updating them...), so I think they might be better off in a separate article. But I wouldn't move any prose to there as I wouldn't want to have the same problem that we have for the two Australia articles where the content on mitigation policy aspects is currently spread haphazardly over two articles (Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia and Climate change in Australia)... EMsmile (talk) 00:06, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

User talk:EMsmile We can move it, but I would just copy the prose currently in the article to the new article if we were to do that. An article without this prose and just the table would get deleted. It will also not get out of date, as I will update it every year. I did it two days ago, and it wasn't as hard as last year because i didn't have to write new data for each year and recreate the categories. If you are worried about people stopping o read at this point, we can move the tables back to the bottom, that would do the trick.

Honestly, there is a lot of information missing in this article, especially about the impact of climate change. I would like to work on it a bit more, see how big this article gets, and then think about splitting it again. Mottezen (talk) 02:14, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@Mottezen I am also undecided what's best. But I don't think the article would get deleted if it only contained the tables. We would just declare it a "list" type article, similar to this one: List of countries by greenhouse gas emissions. It's by the way interesting to see how it was done for other countries. For example in China, the article Greenhouse gas emissions by China is the bigger one, and Climate change in China is the smaller one. I think it should be the other way around. "Climate change in Country X" should be the parent article; "Greenhouse gas emissions in Country X" should be the sub-article. EMsmile (talk) 04:27, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps shift it to the bottom in a "Statistics" section as suggested by Mottezen for now. Keeps it on this page for greater visibility, but is less disruptive to the prose of the actual article. CMD (talk) 04:32, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Not sure about the new section on "policy assessments"

Hi User:Mottezen, I see you have added a new Level-2 heading called "policy assessments" for 3 sentences from a report that was recently added to this article (and also to another 8 or so "climate change in country X" articles by USer:אלכסנדר סעודה). I would prefer if that content doesn't get a new Level-2 heading as we have thought long and hard about the Level-1 and Level-2 headings and have put them into a standard template which all articles should adhere to. This is not to stifle the editors but to make it easier for the readers to find what they are looking for. The standard template is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Climate_change/Style_guide#Outline_for_articles_about_specific_countries_or_geographies . If everyone now starts to add new Level-2 headings just for the results from one study then it will become messy again. Also, I would not call the results from this study "policy assessments". For me it's more activism, trying to get governments to set higher targets, right? So I would either move it into an existing Level-2 heading (for activism?) or make it a new Level-3 heading with the aim that more content will be added there in future. And shouldn't the heading be more along the lines of "Critical reception" for government policies or alike? EMsmile (talk) 13:01, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Hey EMsmile, I do appreciate the standard headings as they helped organize this previously messy article. However, I disagree with their rigid adherence. If some information does not fit well into it, we can create new level-2, or even level-1 headings for them. The standard headings are there to help the information be better presented, and we can diverge from it when that stops being the case.

On the issue at hand, while the “policy assessment” section is currently pretty small, there are many more assessments of Canadian climate policy that can be included in this section.

On the merits of including this information in an “activism” section, I think this is a great philosophical question. Indeed, the foucauldian view that knowledge is political, and thus that research is activism, is especially relevant in the field of climate science. This study might be shared and cited by climate activists, but then again, don’t they cite the IPCC report as well? Can’t any piece of serious climate science be read as a call to action? While an interesting exercise, Wikipedia shouldn’t think to hard about it. Serious research on climate change and climate policy should be labelled as such, however damning are their conclusion. The activism section should be reserved for actual organizing work to make the changes needed happen. Mottezen (talk) 17:54, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

OK, fair enough, it doesn't fit well under "activism" in that case. But I am still not sure if a Level-2 header called "policy assessments" is ideal or if a better wording could be found. Whose policies are being assessed and by whom? Maybe rather "Independent assessments of government policies"? Also, perhaps you are onto something that should be included in the standard structure layout. Therefore, I am inviting you to write about it on the WikiProject Climate talk page so we can ponder this also for other articles, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change/Style_guide. EMsmile (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not really familiar with other articles in the Category:Climate change by country. However, I have a hard time seeing any other countries where the second order header "policy assessment" would fit well. Usually, it might have a place as a third-order header under "Policies and legislation", but Canada's substantial decentralization makes it kind of an exception. We already split the "policies and legislation" in two: provincial and federal. However, the way it's set up, their performance can only be assessed together. This is because each order of government has a different role. Under the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, the federal government sets the national and regional ghg reduction targets while the provincial government set up the system to reach the targets in practice and technical detail. If a provincial government doesn't have a credible plan to reach the targets, the federal government can step in and impose their own carbon pricing system onto them. These interconnection makes it so that any assessments of climate policy in Canada takes in consideration these two orders of government, or at least compares each provinces' approach. And don't worry, there are plenty of assessments available on the web to fill up that section beyond the current 3 sentences. Mottezen (talk) 07:05, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello. In my opinion the best is writing this information within the section about mitigation, in the subsection about policy, without special heading.

--Alexander Sauda/אלכסנדר סעודה (talk) 13:16, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Paris agreement

Hello! We are three students from the Ecological Effects of Climate Changes course at Uppsala University. We're working on updating the paris agreement in some of the climate change articles as part of our coursework. We're learning and welcome any feedback.--Jojo2952 (talk) 21:14, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Many of the statistics cited are outdated

Many of the sources discussed as current are in fact from 2013-2017. The article would benefit from a general review and updating of statistics. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 17:04, 8 July 2024 (UTC)